


A Mouth That Doesn't Smile

by orphan_account



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Destroy Ending, F/M, Nongraphic Description of Injuries, Not Beta Read
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-23
Updated: 2013-08-23
Packaged: 2017-12-24 09:28:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/938323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“My best friend just asked me why we didn't let her die.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Mouth That Doesn't Smile

**Author's Note:**

> note: there's a brief scene with a nongraphic description of facial wounds  
> and. I. sort of. Veered off prompt. Like. Really badly.
> 
> title is a line from "[daisy](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwx8M_7hcRE)" by brand new

Javik considers the Commander with a sickening sense of clarity, stares at the spider-thin cuts that run along her bruised, broken cheeks—the hidden burns that still cover her neck and shoulders, the broken fingers, the shattered bones. He almost reaches out—again—to touch her palm. He frowns instead, looks down at the edges of her cot, at the shard of glass and piece of charred armor her teammates left on a pedestal. (“She'll like the joke,” the krogan Urdnot Wrex had insisted weakly. Tali'Zorah had huffed at him and from behind her helmet. The armor had been left there among the rest of the gifts anyway—a rock from Tali'Zorah, a framed picture of the deceased Admiral, a krogan toy with a gun posed over its head, he thinks he sees a book of poetry and a stuffed varren among the thick stretch of half-dead flowers.) A dead ideal. “Perhaps we can see what peace is finally like, Commander.” He takes the stone from Rannoch, turns it over in his hand, and revels in the memory of sunlight and clear, warm air that rises up from its rough surface. The letter from Tali'Zorah had been long, written on paper, and spattered with vague stanzas of potential poetry.

“I'm not a poet,” the quarian had told him quietly as they sat alone besides the Commander's bed. “It's more of a joke. For her.” She had paused to carefully take the Commander's hand in both of hers, to press the smooth surface of her helmet against the human's healing fingers. “It's an _appropriate_ one,” she had added. Her voice had hitched with a quiet, desperate anger. She remained quiet after that. Javik continued to read the letter. She spoke of agriculture. Of a quarian named Veetor of the admiral they had rescued from the planet's surface. “She'll laugh,” she told him roughly. The face of her helmet was turned towards the hunk of armor. “It was a part of her. It's in bad taste. But she'll like it.” A watery laugh laces through her words. “She has the worst sense of humor.”

She had left then. Told Javik to contact her if he thought the letter was too emotional—illegible. He had merely nodded, slipped the thin sheafs of paper back into their envelope when it spoke of teammates Javik had never known—a man named Kaidan, a turian named Garrus. The feeling of anger and grief—knotted and hard in the back of his throat—had been too much to contemplate.

The rock had been safer to examine.

It held memories of Shepard. A brief touch. A warm, indulgent smile as the two women had stood shoulder to shoulder on the cliffs of Rannoch and watched the horizon as the breeze flitted by, touched the unmasked face of the quarian as Shepard looked up at her. Such easiness.

“The war has been won,” Javik says to the stillness, to Shepard's twitching fingers and bruised knuckles as her breathing sharpens. He replaces the stone, allows the pads of his still healing fingers to run along its surface once more—lingers along the memory of the unguarded smile in Shepard's blue eyes, the easy set of her wide shoulders, the curve of her soft mouth. “In my cycle,” he says as he breathes in the smell of antiseptic, “they would say that you are no longer needed.” Shepard blinks and exhales sharply; the sound is high and breathy. “They would say your... use has come and gone.”

He watches the twitch of her fingers—subtle and heavy, he's reminded of the time after Thessia, when he found her in the mess hall drinking, alone. She had moved as if she were in water—drowning. Perhaps she had been. There had been a memory—when she was a child, back before Mindoir had been razed, she had fell under the surface too long, her lungs had filled, she had felt water everywhere, between her fingers, webbing between her small toes. He wonders if he touches her now—if he brushes the tips of his fingers against her delicate, still healing skin—would that be the memory that surfaces first? Of breathing in and feeling heavier and heavier—or would she remember something else? Maybe the intoxicated nights of her shore leave when she had waved away her crew in favor of shuttering the Admiral's apartment closed and blocking out the sounds of anything outside of her own mind?

He almost takes her hand when she whimpers.

The sound throws him off. The weakness. The fragility. It's an admission he has never heard—never thought to consider—along the lips of his Commander. He has heard her shriek, curse, yowl in pain and grief before; but this. He blinks slowly and watches in stunned silence as the whimpers and quiet groans swell in volume. Her voice cracks and stutters when she tries to shout—call out. She shudders and he nearly knocks his chair back in his attempt to call for a nurse. The seconds that tick by—filled with Shepard's weak, pain-filled cries—feel distant. Even with a bullet tearing through her shields he has never heard— _this_.

A nurse bursts past him, already swearing and calling for others, telling him to get out of the way—and the air feels colder than it did before as three nurses and the Cerberus scientist crowd into the room. The memory of water, crushing pressure, and a strangled yell caught in his throat breaks the surface chases away the panic and worry and—it's _terror_.

He can taste it sliding thickly alongside the rising pitch of Shepard's screams.

Desperation.

Agony.

 _Where am I_?

*

He stands amidst the Citadel wreckage, his hands clasped tightly behind his back, and his jaw clenched.

They had found her here.

He remembers the message—hardly anything more than static and garbled, half understandable sentences, but just long enough and clear enough to send a quaking sigh of relief through the Normandy's skeleton crew. “We can help her,” Miranda Lawson had said on the video, her face and voice distorted. “It's not optimistic but—” and it had cut short. But, it was enough. The Commander's crew had stayed still, disbelieving for moments before a thin vein of happiness—of hope, the first since the Normandy AI had not been able to be brought back—had pulsed through them. The quarian had laughed despite the wounds still healing from the last push on Earth and the added strain of her suit malfunctioning. He remembers Tali'Zorah taking the Commander's name from the wall where the asari had put it up—of her staring at the metal plate before running her fingertips over older names already weathered from touch.

“She's doing better.” Tali'Zorah's voice is quiet but she feels strong standing at his shoulder. She mirrors him, hands clasped loosely behind her back, she doesn't turn to him as she speaks. “They've had to up her medication. Miranda is trying to save her arm. But.” The silence between them is muffled by the sounds of others still digging, still looking for loved ones. He sees Urdnot Grunt digging besides James Vega. “How are you?”

Her words are gentle. “You left so quickly yesterday.” She still does not turn to him. “She woke up for a little bit. She.” Tali'Zorah breathes out heavily. “It was hard. I can understand if you wanted to wait until she was better.”

Javik can still hear her in his head—strong and persistent, enraged and terrified. He grunts.

“I am fine.”

She laughs brokenly. “I'm not. My best friend just asked me why we didn't let her die.”

 _Your use has come and gone_.

“And just when I think I have her figured out.” Tali'Zorah sighs. “I... I should get back.”

“Yes.” Javik closes his eyes—listens as the quarian hesitates in her steps, listens to the krogan bellowing orders, to James Vega making half-hearted jokes, to the wails of those who have found the remains of a loved one to hold. He stays there—quiet and, blessedly, alone—until it begins to rain.

*

“I detest what you have become, Commander,” Javik tells her some time later. Tali'Zorah has left for Rannoch with a promise to keep in contact. (“She'll want to know what's going on when she's herself again,” she had said, her voice was soft and gentle, almost as if she had seen the Commander this way before. Javik still finds himself curious about the implication, but even now he does not find it in himself to pry into the quarian's thoughts on the matter. Shepard fills his mind enough without Tali'Zorah's opinions skewing his perception.) The new book Tali'Zorah had left sits on the nightstand under the stone from Rannoch. Shepard has not looked at it once this past week. “Commander. You are stronger than this.” She doesn't turn towards him, but he can still see the pale blue of the human's visible eye. He wonders. Is she thinking of Mindoir today? Or is she thinking of staring at her allies down the barrel of her shotgun—or is she watching as a woman with her face, her body, her voice plummets to her death. Does she see the asari Justicar's body crumpling before her as she reaches—a second too late?

“Commander.” She breathes out raggedly, fists the sheets in her hand and says nothing as her fingernails bite into the heel of her palm. “Shepard.” Anger. It hits him in a heavy wave. He can taste blood at the back of his mouth, feel water rushing into his lungs, and can feel the ragged edge of a scream ripping past his throat as the smell of death seeps into his pores. “ _Shepard_.” Her name feels foreign on his tongue. This rawness that crashes through him doesn't have a name anymore. _She_ doesn't have a name. “This is not who you are, Shepard.”

Or perhaps it always has been.

She had always had anger, doubt—An aching, hollow sorrow that had drawn him to her in the first place. “ _Get out_.” Her voice is tight. Javik stands, hesitantly, and she finally looks at him. The right side of her face is mangled—still healing scars tear from temple to chin, her right eye is gone, burns crawl along the side of her neck and up and down—she is not the woman he met previously.

 _We will not be able to duplicate the Lazarus Project perfectly_ , Miranda Lawson had told the Normandy crew. _Our priority is getting her breathing again_.

“ _Get out_.”

*

“I did not mean what I said on my first visit, Commander—rather. You misinterpreted me.” Shepard's breathing is steady. Quiet. Her face, even with the scars Miranda has not been able to mend, looks softer. He has half a mind to touch the patches of hair that have begun to grow along the healed areas of Shepard's head. “You are Victory, Commander,” he keeps his voice no louder than a whisper. Nurses pace nervously in front of the Commander's room, glancing but daring not to step in as they arrange medications and speak of physical therapy regimens to Ashley Williams and the Normandy doctor. Javik grunts. “In my cycle, they would not waste their time attempting to find you. They would count you a casualty—an honorable death befitting your avatar. They would not have dragged you away from Death.” He pauses. Listens to the steady beep of the EKG, to the Commander's even breaths. “We... would have celebrated you.” He steeples his fingers, considers the way Miranda Lawson has managed to remake the majority of Shepard's face—to make her look more like what she was before. “We would have left you.”

He almost reaches for her remaining hand.

He touches his fingers to the edge of her remade jaw instead.

“We would have been wrong to, Commander.”

Regret is a new taste in his mouth.

“I would have been wrong to.”

*

It was so much easier to hate her.

**Author's Note:**

> "First Post-War date; A hospital visit with Shepard barely awake and doped up on meds. Javik uses this opportunity to speak truthfully about how he feels, knowing Shepard might not register it."  
> prompted by [juliandroid](http://juliandroid.tumblr.com/) on tumblr


End file.
